I just posted this comment in response to Neil Garfield’s blog entry about the school shooting.

************* Bob Hurt’s comment *************

Up to “YOU,” Neil? I guess you have stated the problem. Maybe you should have said “It’s all up to ME.” But then you don’t have a plan except, well, a little more gun control.

Your echoing of the story of the shooting in the Connecticut school only poses a problem, a traditional liberal scare tactic You pose no actual solution. You murmur the tired, effete, insipid liberal sentiment of restricting gun ownership.

When people have to give up their dangerous weapons, others will rob and murder them. Every public school operates under a no-weapons-on-campus rule. So frustrated, demented bad-asses come into them from time to time and mow down whomever they can.

IF those bad-asses knew that every teacher and staff member packs heat, they would not do that, would they, Neil. Here’s how Israeli teachers protect their children:

Teacher packs heat, protects kids

Our public schools show PRECISELY WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN Government disarms a society. Bad-Asses will rape, murder, pillage, and plunder. Think RWANDA, Neil. Think CONGO.

I DO have a plan:

PART ONE:

Arm ALL SCHOOL TEACHERS AND STAFF and REQUIRE them to take periodic competency training with the weapon so they can use it in emergencies to gun down trouble makers (including kids who try to beat them up).

Teachers should also carry non-lethal weapons like laser pointers that can blind an adversary or burn the adversary’s skin or clothing.

Naturally all such weapons should have fingerprint/iris/voice recognition built in to prevent unauthorized persons from operating them.

Teachers and staff have a RIGHT to defend themselves, not to run around like the metal ducks at a carnival shooting gallery.

PART TWO:

Eliminate “bad” (stupid, irresponsible, and criminal) people from our society.

1. Stop procreating them – the bulk of welfare and social problems in America come from inferior and defective people. No law of nature gives stupid and irresponsible people any special right. The law of the survival of the fittest, “SOF,” typically mandates their death. That becomes unnecessary when we stop procreating them. When government actually protects them instead, and finds no way to obtain the benefits of SOF, government thereby guarantees their proliferation. Every state should enact a constitutional amendment that forbids the procreation of children who are stupid or seriously defective in some other way. That becomes most humanely possible through sterilization of the stupid and defective, and through broad encouragement for smart, able people to procreate large families..

2. Stop granting suffrage to them – allowing the stupid and irresponsible to vote guarantees that the city, count, state, and nation will have criminals at the helm of government who rob from the smart and responsible and give to the stupid and irresponsible. That has made America into a welfare state that enslaved the productive in society so as to bestow largess on the criminal and feckless, both inside and outside of the USA.

As a nation we breed, feed, and cultivate the stupid and irresponsible, and we allow them to control government, almost as though we have a sacred duty to do it. 25% of the population haven’t the intelligence to graduate from high school. Another 15% haven’t the responsibility to do so. That MUST stop or the USA will slide ever further year by year into third world status and become the anus of civilization.

[Editor’s note: I would add PART THREE: legal requirements for training of prospective parents and spouses, and preventing conception by and in all people until married, living with the spouse, and financially stable. I neglected to mention that in the response.]

I mean no personal insult here, Neil, but you have proposed a solution for the school shooting that I find as ridiculous and unworkable as your solution to foreclosures. Please allow me to explain.

You encourage people to hire you and your associates to do securitization audits, loan audits, and fight against the foreclosure process, EVEN THOUGH YOU KNOW that every mortgagor signed the note and mortgage, took the loan, owes payments, and must forfeit the collateral house for failure to pay according to the note’s terms.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A VIABLE FORECLOSURE DEFENSE in such a circumstance with a valid mortgage loan.

NOTHING the lender/assignee does with the note changes the above facts. So, using foreclosure defects as a defense merely delays the inevitable foreclosure. The borrower who fails to pay RIGHTLY becomes DOG MEAT for the lender DOG. Trying to snatch the dog’s meat away from the dog simply wastes resources and increases mortgagor costs and ruins the mortgagor’s credit rating further.

The ONLY PRACTICAL DEFENSE of foreclosure lies in an ATTACK AGAINST THE MORTGAGE. Every home mortgagor in the past 10 years should get the mortgage comprehensively examined for causes of action like tortious conduct, contract breaches, and legal errors by the lender and agents. Such causes of action might VOID the mortgage and garner huge damage awards in litigation, or provide leverage to negotiate a mortgage cram-down (reduction of loan balance to present value of the house).

Only rarely (almost as rare as chicken’s teeth) can you get anything close to either of those benefits by defending against the foreclosure. You only get them by ATTACKING THE MORTGAGE.

I know the only man in the country who can do a competent comprehensive mortgage examination. And that man is not you, Neil Garfield. Sadly, your foreclosure solution is no better than your school shooting solution.

Neil Garfield posted: “We all know that there was a tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday. It was happening while we were pursuing our daily errands and work routines. I was typing an article on the blog, oblivious to the fact that at that very moment a gunm”

New post on Livinglies’s Weblog

We all know that there was a tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday. It was happening while we were pursuing our daily errands and work routines. I was typing an article on the blog, oblivious to the fact that at that very moment a gunman not only shot his way into the school killing the principal and other administrators and educators, but mostly killing children whom he shot, in some cases up to 11 times each. How dead did they need to be before the crazed gunman turned to the next child, aged 6 or 7?

The death toll is placed at 28 by most organizations on the scene. He aimed well with skillful precision having been brought out to the gun range for target practice by his Mother who legally purchased the weapons but obviously left them in a place where the gunman could gain easy access to them. He shot her before he left dressed commando style to commit one of the worst atrocities at a school in our history. And based upon history and human nature, there is no other reasonable expectation but that this will happen again and again with escalating numbers of dead victims.

I’ve heard comments like “at least it wasn’t as bad as Virginia Tech or Aurora.” Yes it is just as bad and the numbers of dead victims are barely relevant to the atrocity visited upon the actual victims and their families, the witnesses, and the children and adults who will be scarred for the balance of their traumatic lives.

Yet at the same time this school shooting was taken place, someone was planning a similar shooting the next day. We live in a society in which there are, on average, 32 murders by gun each year. Other countries have had incidents, but on balance the number of gun murders in the U.S. per capita, far exceeds the numbers in all other Western nations. On a visual chart it looks like the lines plotted for our country don’t even belong there because they are so far out of line with dozens of other countries and have been for decades.

It all comes down to determining our priorities — is it more important to protect people who have or want guns or is it more important that we protect our citizens, our children, from being targeted by gun violence. That is a fight between ideology and reality. 74% of NRA members are in favor of reasonable gun regulation, about the same as the rest of the population.

The dirty little secret is that the amount of money being made by NRA leaders, lobbyists and vendors not only gives out the wrong message, but is making them richer, by the day, in opposing any regulation on gun purchases and ownership. In Florida and other states you need to renew your license every three years to use a dangerous instrumentality — a car. It is deemed a dangerous instrument because cars kill around 40,000 people per year.

I’m a gun owner and I possess weapons requiring a license if I want to leave the house. But I should be subjected to at least license requirements and renewals the same as cars. For those who say that the second amendment should protect them the government knowing their gun ownership and usage, we cannot deny they have a point simply because of the second amendment, which is the law of the land. Taken literally, it would appear that weapons of any kind should be just as available to members of the public as the military.

Yet taken to extreme, this would mean that missiles, cannons and nuclear weapons should be in the hands of civilians. With 32 gun deaths per day, how many times would we read in the newspaper that more missiles and nuclear attacks from domestic terrorists have occurred? There is obviously a tipping point where even the most ardent NRA member would concede that such weapons should not be allowed in the hands of the public. At that point these same anti-government ideologists concede that government indeed plays a rule in keep the playing field level and safe.

Those on the left end of the political spectrum mus realize and accept that the the second amendment actually exists and that some of the measures they propose would eviscerate the rights set forth in that amendment. In the end it is a process of keeping out children safe. We must balance rights perhaps too strongly worded but nonetheless in existence as set forth in the 2d Amendment with he public policy need to regulate the sale, ownership and use of those weapons.

Taking the ultra-orthdox gun owners’ arguments at their word, they want to be protected from a government or society gone wild. But a simple mind experiment (or actual experience if you have one) will tall you that even if you possessed the same number and caliber of weapons, you will never have the same number of soldiers that the government controls and that arming every household will only lead to more domestic filing shootings (a primary source of gun deaths) and death by police, in all probability, without enough intelligence to know what was going on or why.

32 gun deaths per day or to put it annually, that would make it 11, 585 per year, more than 3 times the number killed on 9-11. Over the term of a President, more than 48,000 gun related fatal crimes, some including police officers, around the same number of American treasure lost in the entire Vietnam war.

When it is bad enough in a wealthy, white neighborhood, it makes front page news. In the inner city the deaths from young gun wielding people in and out of school has reached daily epidemic proportions. We are numb to violence because it is all around us in reality, on TV, movies and video games.

Like the frog in the pan full of water, we are unaware that the heat has been gradually increasing until we are already cooked. And we reward the ratings of main steam media for continually reporting breaking news that is hours, days or even weeks old. It’s not the news that is breaking, it is the news media process that is broken.

It has been the same with foreclosures. Despite the fact that we know the thousands are being foreclosed we are accustomed to hearing the numbers without calculating the shattering of human lives, hopes, dreams and illusions of safety. Like the fanatical gun lobbyists, we rationalize to ourselves that because the homeowner did receive the benefits of a loan, that a stranger to the transaction can simply steal the house without ever have been a creditor, and without ever having pout money at risk for funding or acquiring a loan.

We know about the fabrication, forgery and corruption of title just as we know another 32 people will lose their lives today in gun violence. We know it’s wrong to shoot a 6 year old by 11 times with assault-style weapon and we know that something went horribly wrong in the mortgage meltdown.

We are leaving the evidence on the ground — the forgeries, theft, fabrications and illegal means used to steal homes, but we do nothing. But we steer away from the essential question of why these homes are in danger of foreclosure and why the banks should receive the benefit of a free house plus a profit that often exceeds the false appraised value of the house used at closing. We don’t ask why?

We are at a boiling point in our history allowing 280 million guns and the coup d’etat using money instead of weapons run our country. Are we going to sit there or are we going to let the boiling pot break into our sensibilities and move us us to action.